Municipalities frequently run multiple rounds of voting to most fairly reduce the number of candidates from several to two. After the first round of voting the leading candidate frequently may only have a lead of a few percent over two other contenders, with the support of say 15% of the total voters. It doesn't seem a good reflection of voter sentiment to elect a candidate for mayor who only has the support of a small minority of voters when multiple other candidates have almost similarly small minority support. This is especially the case when substantially more votes have been cast for the several weakest candidates than the winning candidate. The obvious solution is to eliminate the weakest candidates and hold yet another round of voting, thereby ensuring that the support for the weakest eliminated candidates is recast for the stronger candidates. After a few iterations, or rounds of voting, wherein the weaker candidates are gradually eliminated from the ballots, and when only two candidates remain, it is hoped that the winning candidate will be elected by a substantial percentage of the voters, and the will of the people will be better reflected by the voting results. Yet another solution to the problem is to eliminate all but the first and second ranked candidates after the first round of voting, and then to allocate the votes of the eliminated candidates to one of the remaining candidates based on their rankings of those remaining candidates. The largest problem with this multi-round voting approach is not only the cost of staffing the voting polling stations for multiple days. Another problem is the expense.
One alternative to multiple round voting is to simply have a single round of voting as is the case in federal presidential elections. A single round of voting does not necessarily ensure the best reflection of the will of the people. For example, in the 1992 federal election Bill Clinton beat the incumbent George H W Bush, as well as the independent businessman Ross Perot. It was subsequently surmised that Ross Perot largely cannibalized the votes that otherwise would have been cast for the incumbent President. The cost of multiple rounds of voting are generally very expensive, and in a federal elections multiple rounds of voting are deemed prohibitively expensive. What is needed is a better way of running an election for a single office. A method which is able to poll the electors and best chooses a candidate which best reflects the will of the people.